Years ago, in fact many years back, music was a commodity only the wealthy and privileged managed to afford and only the elite recording industries could produce with much success. As years went on and we CD's were introduced, they were still and costly and clumsy as the good ol' vinyl record. These CD's were frequently stuffed with 'filler' songs to help market the single that was being sold. Before mammoth hard drives and broadband connections were introduced, this went essentially unnoticed by society. Online technology improved and so became easier to transfer awfully big amounts of info thru the internet and enterprising folk discovered that CD's, as a digital media form, were customized for the wired world. suddenly, groups such as the Beatles, STYX and the Carpenters were much more accessible to the typical guy than ever before. It also authorized any listener to have more control of what songs they were paying for and what songs they did not want to pay for. Remember, back in the days of vinyl, you bought an album or 45, you were not buying the song itself. This did not change when we changed from viyl to 8-tracks, to cassettes, to CDs, and then ultimately to free music downloads. You license it, only until you need another copy. If you bought an album and it became damaged in some shape, your only alternative was to buy another album, which implied you now owned 2 licenses to the music on that album, even if you only had one album to play. It's also a lot faster to carry around a cassette tape than it's a record player. Folk could make multiple copies of one song and keep them in assorted places to liten to during the day. This made the recording industry a little frightened. Then came CD's and the Net. With CD-burning software and CD-ROm drives available on most PC systems, duplicating music is easier than ever. But recording firms realized their profits were surging out the window due to this new technology. This is when the came down with laws and prerequisites concerning licensing to the general public and increased their court actions against those that violated these rules. A number of these rules didn't sit well with the general public. Free music downloads need to be carefully monitored for several reasons. When you pay for music downloads, be conscious of the guidelines and rules before making a purchase. Free music downloads are there for you to hear a song from a particular album from that artist and to decide if you want to get the whole album. This is to help boost the musicians albums and does bring in much income. You might assume the music industry has been robbed of millions and millions of greenbacks from robbery on line, but recall, a great lesson was learned during these few years which caused minds to reconsider and re-evaluate the music world as it is today. These new and complicated technologies have benefited the music business 10 times over and have obtained them any loss that could have occurred during the robbery time. . |